By Blood Written Page 3

  “In this day and age, how does one even know what a moral compass is?”

  “Oh, one can know quite precisely what a moral compass is, and whether one has one …”

  “I believe that all crime fiction is a morality play,” Michael said. “Everyone who writes about crime must confront the duality of and the battle between good and evil. I do it in my own way and with my own insights. I look around me every day and I see that in the battle between good and evil, evil is winning.”

  Michael stopped for a moment, pausing to sip his own drink. “How else can you explain the resurgence of the Republican right wing?”

  Audrey smiled. “Okay, you’ve got me there. Still, no one’s ever seen anything quite like this before. At least not with this degree of popular success. How do you do it?”

  Michael smiled back at her, then raised his glass as if about to make a toast. “With the same two tools every writer uses: imagination and research.”

  CHAPTER 4

  Sunday morning, Nashville

  Max Bransford couldn’t remember the last time the entire Murder Squad of the Metro Nashville Police Department had been assembled in one room at one time. The fourteen investigators were a mix of male and female; black, white, and Hispanic. On the surface they appeared diverse, almost a chaotic and random sampling of the population yanked in off the street and cast as homicide detectives in a cop movie.

  Bransford knew, however, that each of his homicide investigators shared one common trait: the inability to fit in with any other part of the police department. Homicide detectives were mavericks, independent and contentious. More than a few of them were openly disrespectful of the police hierarchy, local politicians, and authority in general. Many were obsessive-compulsive to the point of burnout. Unable to let go of their work, they often had to be forced to take accumulated vacation time.

  Gary Gilley, for instance, hadn’t been home in almost thirty hours. He was already beyond his shift end when the call came in on the two murdered girls at Exotica Tans. He could have passed the case along to another detective, but had chosen to stay on as the primary. He’d been at the crime scene most of the night, then at the lab waiting for the autopsy and the results from the dozen or so tests that had been performed on the victims. Now Bransford watched as Gilley wearily sat down in a folding chair, eyes swollen and red from lack of sleep, stale air, and cigarette smoke. Bransford knew that if Gilley’s stomach was anything like his, it was already burning from too much charred squad-room coffee and too little decent food. Bransford intended to order Gilley home to sleep as soon as the briefing was over.

  Bransford stepped to a worn wooden podium in front of a dusty chalkboard and cleared his throat loudly.

  “Let’s go, folks,” he announced. “Let’s take our seats and get rolling on this one.”

  “This better be good, Lieutenant,” Maria Chavez-

  Music City’s first Hispanic female homicide investigator-

  announced. “You know how my mom hates me to miss Sunday dinner.”

  “I know,” Bransford said, his voice guttural and strained.

  “I hate to call you all in on a Sunday, but this one’s a no-brainer. Had to do it.”

  To Bransford’s left, near the door, a well-dressed, neatly groomed man in a dark suit stood with an almost military bearing. Clasped in his hands was a leather-bound, three-ring portfolio bulging with papers. Seated in a folding chair next to the man was Howard Hinton, the homicide investigator from Chattanooga.

  Bransford rapped his knuckles on the wooden podium and cleared his throat again.

  “Okay, folks, listen up. As most of you know, we had a double murder last night down on Church Street near Baptist Hospital. Little place tucked away in an old strip mall called Exotica Tans.”

  Two of the younger investigators in the back row whooped at the mention of the tanning salon.

  “As you might have guessed, there was a lot more going on in those tanning booths than the simple nurturing of melanomas.”

  More hoots followed as Bransford held up his hands, palms out, for silence.

  “Yeah, real funny, you clowns, except for the fact that two coeds from MTSU were literally slaughtered and set out on display.”

  Bransford looked down at his notes. “The first victim was a nineteen-year-old Caucasian female, one Sarah Denise Burnham. No sheet, no warrants, no record. The second was Allison May Matthews, twenty-two years old, also Caucasian female. No file on her, either.”

  Bransford looked back up, rubbed the bridge of his nose, and forced his eyes to focus on the now silent faces in the squad room. “What we’ve got here are two young girls who we figure were picking up some extra cash to get through school. We’re trying to track down someone from the MTSU

  registrar’s office to get their school records, but this being Sunday, we haven’t had much luck.

  “Gary’s taking primary on this one, and he’ll be assigning chores after this briefing is over. The entire Murder Squad is on task force for this one. Even though these two girls were working their way through school at a hand-job joint, they still came from regular families, and believe me, folks, there are some mothers and fathers out there right now demanding to know when we’re going to catch the animal that did this. Even the mayor called the chief’s office on this one.

  And you all know what that means.”

  “Yeah,” a voice called out from the back of the room.

  “Shit flows downhill.”

  Amid the ensuing laughter, Bransford turned to his left, caught the eye of the man in the dark suit, then nodded to him.

  “This is the real reason, though, that we’re putting all we got into this one,” Bransford announced loudly, “and it’s not the mayor’s phone call. It appears from the crime scene and the results of the lab investigation that we may have a celebrity at work. Seems that our tanning salon murderer may be a pro. We’ve got a gentleman in from Washington who’s going to tell us what we’re in for and who we’re looking for.

  I’m going to turn this discussion over to him now, and after that, Detective Gilley will meet with you briefly.

  “Then,” Bransford added, stepping away from the podium and moving to one of the folding chairs in the front row,

  “he’s going to go home and go to bed if I have to throw him in the back of a squad car to get him there.”

  “Oh, poor baby,” Jack Murray cooed. Murray was the new-est member of the Murder Squad, having just transferred in from Vice a little over six months ago.

  “Yeah,” chimed in Maria Chavez. “You poor, delicate little rosebud.”

  Gilley turned, grinning. “How’d you guys like to spend the rest of the day Dumpster diving in the snow?”

  “If you kids don’t play nice,” Bransford intoned, “I’ll have to send you to your rooms without supper.”

  The dark-suited man approached the podium, opened his leather case, and spread it out in front of him.

  “Quiet everybody,” Bransford growled. “Listen up.”

  “Thank you, Lieutenant,” the man said. “Good morning.

  I’m Special Agent Henry Powell of the FBI. I’m assigned to VICAP, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, and within VICAP, I’m a supervisory agent with CASMIRC.”

  Powell surveyed his audience and noticed several raised eyebrows.

  “I know,” he said, smiling, “and I agree. Washington has terminal acronym disease. CASMIRC is the Child Abduc-tion and Serial Murder Investigative Resources Center, which is the rapid response component of CIRG, the Critical Incident Response Group. What this means in plain English is that when a crime is committed and the local authorities decide or suspect that this crime might be the work of someone who has done this before, then I get called. Last night, I was just finishing my dinner when Sergeant Hinton, your colleague down in Chattanooga, examined the crime scene on Church Street and called me at home. It took him about two sentences to convince me I needed to get down here fast.”

  M
aria Chavez raised her hand, and Powell nodded to her.

  “How did Sergeant Hinton get called up here from Chattanooga?”

  Bransford turned in his seat and faced the group. “Hint and I go back a long way. The Metro crime lab was consulted several years ago when a similar murder occurred in Hamilton County. I called him after Gary called me to the crime scene. Then he called Agent Powell.”

  “So we leapfrogged from one to the next,” Powell continued, “and, as you’ll see, for good reason.”

  Powell stepped out from behind the podium and leaned against it, his right elbow cocked at an angle. “Now without giving you my complete semester-long FBI Academy course called Intro to the Psychopathology of Serial Killers 101, let me just start by telling you that the two victims of last night’s murder were, we believe, murdered by the guy whom we’ve dubbed in-house the ‘Alphabet Man.’ Any of you ever heard of him?”

  Powell’s eyes wandered left and right, searching for a response.

  “Good,” he said, his easygoing smile returning. “That means, for once, we’re doing our jobs. We’ve emphasized with this particular perp more than any other case in my experience the absolute necessity of keeping this guy’s signature just between ourselves. For once, the news media hasn’t put this together. If they ever do, we’re screwed.”

  Powell paused, and as he did, a hand rose in the back of the room.

  “Yes?”

  Jack Murray leaned back in his folding chair and cradled his hands behind his head. “The guy leaves a signature?”

  “Yes, practically speaking. I’ve investigated over two hundred cases in which the homicide was considered the likely work of a serial killer. In those two hundred-plus cases, I’ve seen the work of about two dozen perps and have interviewed fourteen of them after capture. In the case of each one, there was some aspect to the crime that was so unique and repeated so much that it became a signature aspect to the crimes. It was, so to speak, the guy’s calling card.”

  “So what’s our guy’s calling card?” Murray asked.

  Powell stepped away from the podium and over to the wall. “Detective Gilley,” he said, flipping the switch to turn off the overhead lights. “Why don’t we just show them our guy’s signature?”

  Gilley nodded, then stood and walked to the small table holding a slide projector at the back of the room. As he turned on the projector-the fan clattering as its ancient motor sputtered to life-Powell slowly lowered the screen from its holder on the wall above the podium. Gilley pressed the control button, and the first slide came into view on the dingy gray screen.

  Low moans erupted as the slide came into focus. In the first view, the massage table that served as a butcher’s block revealed the bloody corpse of Allison Matthews, her arms and legs still bound, her straining facial muscles still frozen as testament to the nature of her death.

  “What we have here,” Powell explained, “is the work of what we believe to be a primarily organized killer with some random elements of disorganized behavior.”

  Powell paused as Gilley moved to the next slide. This was another view of the murder scene, this time from the opposite side of the room, focusing over the young girl’s body to the large block M painted in her blood on the opposite wall.

  “You’ll notice,” Powell said, “that even with all the blood and carnage of this scene, everything is relatively neat.”

  “Relatively …” a voice whispered in the dark.

  He pointed to one side of the slide. “For instance, you’ll notice on this table that none of the bottles of massage oil are knocked over or even out of place. The large battery-operated vibrator in the corner here is still standing up. If our killer bumped the table and knocked it over, he was fussy enough to pick it back up and put it in its place.”

  Powell stepped into the light and pointed to the middle of the victim’s torso. “You can’t really tell from this slide because of all the blood, but in autopsy it was discovered that a series of shallow cutting wounds were made throughout the chest, torso, and abdomen of the victim, Allison May Matthews. These wounds were superficial and parallel to the lines of cleavage, which meant the sides of the incisions remained together, in some cases almost closing. The incisions were within a quarter-inch of being uniformly spaced apart all the way down the anterior side of the ventral cavity and were within a half-inch of being the same length.”

  Powell turned to face the room and stepped out of the light. “What this means is that our killer is anatomically savvy and very precise. He might even have some kind of medical training.”

  A hand went up in back, from just ahead of the projector.

  “What’s a line of cleavage?” a voice asked from the darkness.

  “The ME could explain it better than I can, but essentially muscle tissue in the body runs in groups that continue in certain directions. These directions are called ‘lines of cleavage.’ If you cut along, or parallel to these lines, then the wounds tend to remain closed, depending on the depth of the incision, of course. If you cut across these lines of cleavage, then the incised wound will be gaping or open and generally much nastier.”

  “So our boy wasn’t trying to chop these girls up?” Bransford asked.

  “Quite the opposite,” Powell said, turning again to the slide and pointing. “Try to look past the gore. What we’ve got here is a situation where Allison was tied up and then patiently, carefully-and extremely painfully-bled to death.

  She also experienced violent sex as well, with both moderate to severe anal and vaginal tearing. However, I’ll have more on that aspect of the scene later.”

  “Was she raped?” Maria Chavez asked.

  “There was no evidence of semen found on either body during crime-scene examination and the autopsy,” Gilley offered.

  Maria turned, faced Gilley. “Kind of a quick determination, isn’t it?”

  “We took swabs, ran acid phosphatase and microscope examination. We’re waiting on the P30,” Gilley said, referring to the test for a specific glycoprotein found only in seminal fluid.

  “In the past murders, we haven’t found semen, either. So we’re going to take for granted at this point,” Powell said,

  “that the sexual violations were with foreign objects or by a condom-wrapped penis.”

  “So the guy goes into what’s essentially a massage parlor,” Maria Chavez spoke up again, “pays his money, goes to a back room with the girl, where, say, the guy offers her an extra fifty or hundred to let him tie her up. Once she’s tied up, the guy takes his time on her.”

  “Let’s hold judgment on that for the time being,” Powell said. “For now, just examine the scene. Notice one thing, up here on the wall opposite the table-”

  “The letter M,” Jack Murray said. “The guy’s signature!”

  “Yes,” Powell answered, “but look at this next set of slides.” He motioned for the next slide.

  Soft, low moans erupted again as the slide of the second victim flashed on the screen. Exponentially more brutal than the first slide, and more brutal than anything most of the investigators had ever seen, the second slide depicted a victim who must have died in unimaginable agony and terror. Sarah Denise Burnham’s last moments of consciousness had to have been as close to hell as any living human could get and still be drawing-even if only for a few moments more-breath.

  Behind him, from off his left shoulder, Powell heard retching disguised as coughing. He’d heard this sort of reaction before from even the most hardened veteran homicide investigators. No one could remain unaffected by a scene like this one.

  “As you can see,” Powell said, “our boy was considerably more thorough with this victim. The ME estimates that he must have spent at least two hours in this room. What you’re seeing is essentially the beginning of an autopsy performed on a live human being.”

  Maria Chavez let loose a sound that was a cross between a gasp and a squeak. “Surely,” she croaked, “the poor girl wasn’t conscious!”

  Powel
l turned. “Your ME estimates that it’s possible the victim could have retained some level of consciousness perhaps even up the point where the thoraco-abdominal incision was complete.”

  “The what?” a voice asked from the back.

  “The Y incision, which in the female begins roughly in the area of the navel and extends upward through the anterior ventral cavity, between the breasts, and then branching out to the shoulders.”

  Powell turned back to the slide. “However, it’s extremely likely that the victim was in a state of severe shock by then and was hopefully rendered insensate. Let’s hope so, anyway, for Sarah’s sake.”

  “Mi Dios,” Maria Chavez whispered, her voice choked.

  “If you examine this photograph closely, you’ll see that following the completion of the thoraco-abdominal incision and the removal of the breastplate, our killer then manipulated the internal organs of the victim. According to the ME, the muscle tissues of the heart were constricted and bruised in a manner consistent with a kind of strangulation maneuver. This is another signature aspect of the Alphabet Man’s murders. In all instances up to the first victim you saw here this morning in the previous set of slides, the killer has performed the beginnings of a surgical-quality autopsy and literally stopped a beating heart with his own hands.

  Then he has removed and manipulated various interior organs before replacing them back in the body cavity.

  “Keep in mind that this is not your typical postmortem evisceration and savage mutilation consistent with the psy-chotic, disorganized work of a delusional, out-of-control madman. What we have here is the very careful and precise work of an organized, psychopathic sexual sadist. And while I know you’re all quite sick of this much detail, there is one other signature aspect of these homicides.”

  “God,” Jack Murray moaned from the back, “we’re afraid to ask.”

  “But you need to know,” Powell said calmly. “Before beginning the thoraco-abdominal incision, the Alphabet Man removes the nipples of his victims and forces the victim to consume them.”